On Thursday, 6 April 2017 at 05:24:07 UTC, Joakim wrote:
D is currently built and optimized for that dying PC platform.
I don't think x86 is dying soon, but I agree that embedded architectures get more important every day and should get more focus.
I would even go so far as to say it may be worthwhile to develop an ARM backend for dmd.
Wasted efforts in my view, there are so many other aspects regarding D which need to be worked on and polished, and we already have (unlike DMD, fully free!) D compilers able to target most architectures used on this planet (with varying level of support obviously, but at least the back-ends are already there). I really don't think DMD for ARM would increase D's popularity on embedded platforms in any way.
More than anything else, we need the community to try building mobile libraries and apps, because compiler support is largely done.
What LDC would primarily need is a CI platform supporting ARM (and ideally AArch64) in order to make it a true first-class target. We don't know of a free CI platform, so ARM isn't tested automatically, and it's currently mostly up to poor you to check for regressions. ;(
Instead of working on an ARM backend for DMD, broadening the upstream runtime libraries for more architectures would make much more sense to me, as it's currently up to LDC and GDC with their severely limited manpower (and the even more limited available hardware to test on) to extend druntime/Phobos for non-x86 platforms. E.g., for AArch64, Phobos fully supporting quad-precision floating-point math would make things easier for us. And full big-endian support in Phobos would be nice for PowerPC targets.
